Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “The jawbone, I told you.”

  “I really doubt it, young lady.”

  “Young lady? You’re not the school principal, dude.”

  “Sorry. He didn’t want the jawbone. I’d bet a steak dinner on it.”

  Anna scoffed. “He offered us two million for the damn thing.”

  “In the end, he paid you to destroy it. That’s not consistent with the Sobell I know. When he gets fixated on something . . . let’s just say he can be quite focused, and he won’t usually be deterred that easily.”

  “Easily? He didn’t have a lot of choice at the time.”

  “Who were the dead men at Mendelsohn’s?”

  Eight dead in a gunfight . . . She remembered Sobell’s words and her own confusion at hearing them. When the job went down, only Nail had been packing—everybody else had carried Tasers and stun grenades, things like that. It had to have been the . . . the monster. The demon that had come roaring up out of Hell and torn some poor bastard apart right in front of her.

  Not if it was bullets, though. Had the gunfight info been correct, or just misinformation? Tommy had caught a bullet, and Anna had no idea if the cult guy who had shot him had done so on purpose or if he’d been aiming at the demon. It didn’t matter. Tommy was just as dead either way.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Cult guys, I guess.” It was just a detail, one of many not worth exploring in the aftermath of the job. “I guess the demon got ’em.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m pretty sure you got conned. Played. Sobell never shows his cards. He’s cagey about what he really wants, because if you know that, you can manipulate him. If I had to guess, I’d say you were a diversion. Classic technique—look at my hand waving on the right while I steal your wallet on the left. Probably he thought you’d be killed, but still make enough noise for him to do . . . whatever it was he really wanted to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Do you suppose he’s stopped playing you now?”

  “What did he want?”

  “Do you think he’ll ever stop playing you?”

  “You’re just talking to stay alive, old man.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  Anna made no answer.

  Chapter 8

  “What’s the word?” Nail asked as Genevieve got into the passenger seat. He hit the gas before she could even close the door. Downtown bothered him for reasons he could never quite put his finger on, and anyway, he had places to be. Wouldn’t do anybody any good if he showed up late.

  Genevieve scowled. “Fucking lawyers. She bought me a six-dollar coffee. Like I’m gonna feel fabulous about all this after she spends six bucks on me.”

  “So no word, then.”

  She tapped her fingers on the door. “No.” Her voice slipped into a prim falsetto. “‘Mr. Sobell is a very busy man. He is tremendously grateful to you, but it will be just a little longer before he can attend to you. I’m sure you understand.’ Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.”

  “Attend to us? What, is he a fuckin’ waiter now?”

  “I don’t even care anymore. I ask her what ‘just a little longer’ means, and she smiles the fakest smile you ever saw in your life and says, ‘We’ll be in touch, I assure you.’”

  Nail took the car up the ramp to the 5, willing the ancient station wagon ahead of him to get moving. Who drove a station wagon these days? Why did they give hundred-year-old women drivers’ licenses?

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. He passed the station wagon, but that was small consolation. A thousand spears of blinding light glanced off the frozen river of traffic ahead. “How many goddamn people need to be driving around at eleven in the morning? Ain’t you people got jobs?”

  Genevieve chuckled humorlessly. “Nobody gets what they want today.”

  “Shit.” He pulled in ahead of a semi and slowed the car. “So we’re sittin’ on Van Horn a few more days.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Can’t say I like that much.” He glanced sidelong at Genevieve. “I don’t think Anna’s holding up too well.”

  “I don’t think I’m holding up too well,” Genevieve said. She smiled like it was a joke, but the smile uncurled and vanished. “No. She’s not. It’s not just this stupid fucking job, either. It’s this stupid fucking job, the last stupid fucking job . . . Karyn.” She stared out the windshield. “I hear Karyn talking sometimes. At night. Anna picked that room so we could hear her, sort of keep an eye on her.

  “She has conversations, you know. Karyn, I mean. And they sound, you know, lucid. Like somebody talking on the phone. And it’ll go on for ten minutes, and you sort of get lulled into this rhythm. Some words, a pause. Some words, a pause. And just when you’re starting to get used to it, like maybe you can let it fade into background noise . . . The other night, after a bunch of normal-sounding bullshit about getting her water heater fixed, she says, calm as can be, ‘Yeah, he cut out his own eyes.’ Cut out his own eyes.

  “So, no, Anna’s not holding up too well,” she said. “Not with that going on in the next room.”

  “‘That’ is my friend you’re talking about there,” Nail said.

  Genevieve made a pained expression and ran her hand over her head to the back of her neck. “Sorry. Shit, I’m sorry. She saved my life, you know? It’s just—this is a mess.”

  “Yeah.” He moved another lane to the left. It looked as though it was going slightly faster, though of course it would stop as soon as he changed to it. That was life. “So, what are you gonna do about it?”

  “About what? Karyn?”

  “Anna.”

  “Just try to be there, I guess. Try to get this damn job over with.”

  Nail nodded. “Be a good start.”

  She pulled a foot up and put one of her boots on the dash. He thought about telling her to knock it off, but it was a little enough thing. He’d wipe it down later. “I don’t want to fuck this up,” she said quietly.

  “The job?”

  “Anna.” She started doing that nervous thing she did, raising her hand to pull at the stud in her lip or eyebrow, but she lost steam and let it drop halfway through the motion. “You’ve known her longer than I have. How do I not fuck this up?”

  “You kidding me? Like I know? Listen, I don’t even think Anna knows. Whole time I’ve known her, I never seen her, you know, with anybody for more than a few weeks. You in uncharted territory, Gen.”

  “Not reassuring.” She sighed. “We need to get this over with—the job, I mean. It’s impossible to even fucking live while this is going on.”

  “Can’t you get Sobell to speed things up? Thought you were tight with the man.”

  “Not tight enough, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” He checked his mirror and moved one more lane to the left. Behind him, a gray sedan braked suddenly to avoid somebody cutting in to his lane. Somebody leaned on their horn. Nail felt like choking the steering wheel. The speedometer was all the way up to fifteen miles an hour now. Probably no way to avoid being late now. “I gotta make a little detour,” he said. “You mind?”

  “It’s your ride.”

  They rode in silence. Genevieve put on a pair of mirrored cop sunglasses—she was wearing them ironically, Nail assumed—and leaned her seat back. By the rhythm of her breathing, he was pretty sure she’d fallen asleep. He watched the road and tried not to swear.

  On a day with decent traffic, the drive would have taken ten minutes, but it was forty-five minutes later when Nail got to his exit ramp. The gray sedan with the touchy brakes exited a couple cars behind him. Probably a coincidence—it was a big road, lots of people on it—but he still breathed a sigh of relief when he turned right and the sedan kept going straight.

  Another fifteen minutes, and he pulled into the strip mall he needed to stop at.

  “Sit tight,” he said. Genevieve sat up, looked around, and leaned back again.


  Nail grabbed a small army green satchel from the floor and got out. It was a miserably hot day in a miserable place. Every store window in the line featured heavy bars. There was a pawnshop, a payday loan place, a burger joint Nail wouldn’t have eaten in at gunpoint, a dollar store, and, inexplicably, a tax preparer. That last had to be a front, he thought, but it was always damn busy around tax time. Who knew?

  He headed for the payday loan shop. A shrill electronic beep shrieked from somewhere when he opened the door, and half a dozen weary-looking Mexican dudes standing in the Western Union line glanced up at him. Must be payday, he thought, and, even as sorry-looking as those guys were, they were peeling off as much of their check as they could to send back home to family. When he looked at it that way, he wasn’t doing too much different.

  He walked over to the loan desk where a kid who didn’t look as if he could possibly be old enough to have graduated from high school sat shuffling some papers.

  “Need to talk to your pops, Tyrell,” Nail said.

  “Come on.”

  Tyrell got up and led Nail around the desk to a door in back. The last thing Nail saw as he went in was a little guy with a huge mustache sliding a wad of bills under the bulletproof acrylic at the cashier’s station. The glare off the acrylic made the inside invisible, so it looked like the man was talking to nobody.

  The back office was a ten-foot-square cell of off-white linoleum squares and industrial gray walls with a desk jammed up against one of the walls. It didn’t matter, Nail supposed, because Clarence never did any actual business in here. True to form, as soon as Nail walked in, Clarence stood up. He was tall enough to loom over Nail, but thin enough that it didn’t seem menacing. It wouldn’t even be a fight, if Nail ever got a chance to take a swing at him. That was why it never came to that—Clarence had ways of protecting himself. Today, he looked sharp in slacks and some kind of buttoned-up light blue bullshit. Nail wondered who he thought he was fooling.

  “Come on back,” Clarence said.

  Nail followed him through the back, down a grubby hall past the bathrooms, and out through another door to the loading dock. The light was blinding out here, but at least the two men got to stand in the shade of the building. There wasn’t much call for loading in and out of the payday loan place, so the trash containers were piled up over here, stinking and buzzing with flies.

  “You’re late.”

  “Maybe we can agree to overlook that this time,” Nail said.

  Clarence frowned. He was maybe fifty, but hard living had taken a hell of a toll on him, and the frown was an upheaval in the geography of his face that caused deep crevasses to appear, aging him further. “Maybe. Depends what you got to say.”

  Nail held the satchel out to him at arm’s length, shoulder strap wound through his fist. It was weighty, a reminder of all the heavy shit he’d done to come up with the contents. “Eighty-five.”

  Clarence’s eyebrows shot up, and the hills and valleys of his visage rearranged themselves again. “The fuck’d you get eighty-five large?”

  Surely he didn’t expect an answer to that question. Nail just held the satchel out, saying nothing.

  “That don’t cover the interest,” Clarence said.

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “No. It don’t.” Was that a trace of a whine in his voice? “Your fool brother been in debt to me for six years, and you think eighty-five is gonna square us up?”

  Eighty-five wouldn’t, no, but Nail had been making payments on DeWayne’s behalf now for almost the whole time. Not always on time, not always enough, but plenty. “Two forty, all in. On a hundred grand of debt, I’d say you’re doin’ all right.”

  Clarence stuck out his jaw. Nail would have liked to plant a fist on it. “Interest is a motherfucker.”

  “Two-forty’s a damn sight more than you’d get by breakin’ DeWayne’s legs.” Take the money, Nail thought. God, it would be great to get out from under this shit. And besides, his shoulder was beginning to ache.

  “The fuck’d you get eighty-five large?” Clarence asked again, and Nail knew he’d go for it. He almost smiled, but that would surely screw the deal. Clarence didn’t like to see anyone smiling. Nail waited wordlessly while Clarence first tried to stare him down, then made a show of doing some elaborate calculation in his head. At the end, though, he grabbed the bag.

  “We’re settled,” Nail said. “DeWayne’s free and clear.”

  Clarence nodded, and then, just as Nail felt his spirits lift, he shrugged. “Till he comes back for more, yeah.”

  That momentary satisfaction was gone, replaced with a low, pathetic rage. He was right, of course. I could kill him, Nail thought, not for the first time. Break his scrawny chicken neck right now. And DeWayne would find somebody else, maybe somebody even less flexible, and Clarence’s people would be gunning for Nail, and nothing would be any better.

  Nail walked back into the building, leaving Clarence holding the sack of money behind him.

  He made it out to the main room just in time to see a gray sedan with tinted windows tool slowly past the front of the building. It didn’t stop.

  * * *

  Anna’s phone rang, and she had it open and at her ear before the second ring. “Bobby,” she said.

  “Yeah. Got a line on that guy. The one was asking about you.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name, believe it or not, is Guy.”

  “No shit?”

  “That’s all he’d give me. He’s . . . odd. Not real stable, I think.”

  “He say what he wants with Karyn?”

  “No. Said he’d meet you, though.”

  Anna tapped her foot, considering. “On my terms, maybe.”

  “Yeah, I don’t even know if that’s such a great idea. He gives me a grade-A case of the creeps. You might just wanna keep your head down, let him keep looking.”

  “Anything specific bothering you?”

  “You know those guys that show up at your door, trying to convert you? They got this vibe like, man, you just ain’t heard the good news yet, and once you do, well, hell, of course you’ll see it their way. That’s Guy all over.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer. Can you get him a message?”

  “Yeah. If you really need me to.”

  “Tell him Paco’s, two o’clock. He doesn’t show, that’s it. He’s missed his chance.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  * * *

  The bar wasn’t empty, even at two in the afternoon. A handful of motorcycles had been parked out front, and inside four heavyset bikers in Mongol jackets had laid claim to the bar and the pool table. Anna knew a couple of them. They were regulars here. Rowdy, but basically good guys if they hadn’t scored any meth lately. By the look of it, they were shitfaced, still partying from the night before. That could be the only possible reason they had Megadeth cranked on the jukebox at this hour. One of them, a guy with a huge head surrounded by a nimbus of graying hair, waved at Anna as she passed, slurring something that sounded roughly like, “Yo, Anna.” She waved back.

  The other half dozen patrons had spread out to the corners—getting anywhere near a drunk Mongol was an opportunity to have your face caved in—and sat drinking individually. Anna had seen most of them here before as well, though she didn’t know them well enough to even recall their names.

  Her guy hadn’t shown yet. She took a seat at the far end of the bar away from the bikers and facing the door and ordered a burger and a beer, exchanging a few words with the bartender in Spanish. With the TV going ahead and the loud chatter of the bikers to her left, this was as close as she’d gotten to relaxing in weeks.

  It didn’t last long. The door opened, flooding the bar with sunlight, and a man who could only be her contact stepped in. She almost gave it up right then and just walked out the back. If her good leads hadn’t proven useless, she would have.

  She gave the exceptional idiot now walking through the door less than two minutes to live if she didn’t interv
ene. Bobby had warned her, but she’d thought he must be exaggerating. That would teach her. The newcomer was slender—the adjective willowy came to mind, probably ganked from one of the romance novels Karyn liked to read sometimes—just shy of six feet tall, and white as fuck. That wouldn’t get him much more than the stink eye—hell, two of the Mongols were white guys—but everything else about him almost guaranteed a beating. He wore a navy blue suit for one thing, like a Bible salesman or maybe a particularly earnest College Republican. For another, his eyes were open too damn wide, as if he was just so excited to be taking in the world around him, and he had a faint, dim-witted smile. If he was a day over twenty, Anna would eat a pack of cigarettes. If he opened his mouth, the Mongols would pound him into oblivion. They were already nudging each other, and one of them asked in a slurred but very loud voice, “What the fuck?”

  The man walked toward the bar, sidling past two of the hulking bikers, who were now openly gaping at him, as though a man this stupid must be the eighth wonder of the world. “Miss Ruiz!” the man said. “Robert said you’d be here.”

  She slipped off her barstool and headed toward him. “I don’t know a Robert,” she said. She met him at the bar. “And you don’t need to use so many names.”

  The Mongols weren’t even pretending to play pool anymore. One of them, a slow-moving, enormous heap of muscle, fat, and hair, began lumbering over. “This guy buggin’ you?” he asked. His pool cue looked about as substantial as a pencil in his oversize paw.

  “Naw, we’re good, Dino.”

  Dino’s eyebrows drew together and down, like he was having a hard time puzzling out what she meant. His gaze shifted to the kid, then back to her.

  “Really. We’re good.”

  “I want his jacket.”

  “C’mon, Dino. You ain’t never gonna fit in that thing.”

  The kid was already shrugging out of it. “Not a problem,” he said. He held the jacket out in one hand. “All yours.”

  Dino snatched it away and leaned toward the kid, glowering. He shook his head. “You dumb as fuck, kid.” He turned away, though, and started back toward the pool table. “Hey! Prospect!” he yelled.